The Speed of Emotion

“In The Making of the President, 1960,^[1] Teddy White lamented that TV might spell the death of serious politics: to give a thoughtful response to serious questions, a politician needed a good thirty seconds to ponder, but television allowed only five seconds of silence at best. DDB [the ad agency of Doyle Dane Bernbach^[2]] found nothing to lament in the fact. They were convinced you could learn everything you needed to know about a product, which in this case happened to be a human being, in half a minute—the speed not of thought but of emotion” (Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus by Rick Perlstein, © 2001).

It seems Theodore H. White was right—about both left and right. Much of our political news, views, tweets, trailers, and posts proceed at the speed of emotion. No need for thought, memory, fact checking, sourcing, courtesy, caution, truth, or déjà vu. Ads, images, sound bites, talking points, “spontaneous” stagings, and so forth—often market-tested for trigger-efficiency and -effect—all set on “speed” and ad nauseam recycle. “Truth” verified by repetition. Enhanced by selective, romantic myth-making!

And though both left and right get caught up in the speed of emotion, there seems no crowd more addicted to “speed”³ than the fractured far-right—particularly Tea Partiers and libertarians. These far-rightists, despite their professed devotion to “individualism,” freedom, and “free markets” have a remarkable predisposition to flock to authoritarian, charismatic leaders; to conform to group-speak without personal examination of issues; to repeat emotive phrases as end-all answers; to denigrate the individualism and freedom of everyone to the left of them; to disregard ideological contradictions⁴; and to advocate violence when “democracy” does not favor their worldview.

Since many to the right claim an affinity to the Christian faith and to an “end-of-times” scenario, perhaps a look backward to the “beginning” and forward to the “end” might prove enlightening.

What powerful groups in the “beginning” of Christianity was so convinced they were right, so devoted to preserving their faith/ideology, and so alarmed at the “devilish” doctrines of a popular itinerant preacher that they devoted themselves to his destruction? Could there be any parallels in our day? Are we so convinced we are saving freedom and the American Constitution that we kill the very (“devilish”) reforms that might preserve a MORE perfect union? Remember Peter and the dream that opened him to the inclusion of Gentiles in his gospel—a complete reversal of prior belief?⁵

And what about the “end-of-times”? What does John the Revelator identify as the great opposition?⁶ Have we been caught in a masterful diversion and deception exacerbated by the speed of emotion? So obsessed with socialism, we miss the Trojan horse cavorting in our midst. The Trojan horse we unfetter and feed to excess as if it were a living thing!

Perhaps we should ask ourselves if we can be enlightened by higher truths IF we are not open to new perspectives.

Perhaps it is time we took the time to temper emotion with thought, memory, research, and honesty about ourselves, our ideologies, our hypocrisies, and the possibility of “being partly right and partly wrong.”

There are options to the speed of emotion. Yes, TV and the internet may overwhelm us with emotive pitches, BUT the internet also gives us the speed of access to fact checking, verifiable history, reputable research, sworn testimony, rational observation, diverse opinion, and communities of thoughtful discourse. Surely, the present speed of emotion, untempered and unbalanced, as we have seen in recent months, cannot continue, if we are to survive as a nation. Emotions are ONLY A PART of who we are. Reason, research, and balanced thought must also precede action. In paraphrase of Mark Twain: “The person who does not think⁷ has no advantage over the one who cannot think⁷.”

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1. Published 1961; best-seller and 1962 Pulitzer Prize winner for general nonfiction
2. The ad agency of Democrats JFK and later LBJ. Republicans became quick imitators.
3. Speed can manifest both as reactionary, knee-jerk explosions or frantic running in place at the speed of “NO,” “NO,” “NO.”
4. One of their main ones is the redistribution of wealth mantra. See http://dejavu-times.blogspot.com/2009/12/beyond-mark_14.html
5. See New Testament Acts 10 for Peter’s enlightenment. Also, could Paul’s words have any parallels? “… they have a zeal of God [or freedom or free markets], but not according to knowledge. For they being ignorant of God's righteousness [or point of view], and going about to establish their own righteousness [or point of view], have not submitted themselves unto the righteousness [point of view] of God. (New Testament Romans 10:2-3). How does God view the rich and the poor? Are free-markets free or just facades to justify power and elitism? See also http://dejavu-timestwo.blogspot.com/search/label/EconomicsOfJesus
6. New Testament Revelation 17 & 18
7. and study, research, ponder, fact check, remember

Judgment at …

(All indented paragraphs are partial quotes from, or are based on portions of, the Judgment at Nuremberg film script, screen play by Abby Mann.)

Sixty-three years ago (1947), the United States conducted a trial examining the issue of individual complicity of justice officials in crimes committed while in the service of the German state. This trial was memorialized in a fictionalized film (1961), entitled, “Judgment at Nuremberg.” Considering recent statements made by former DOJ lawyer John Yoo and several others¹ justifying (redefining) torture and the reach of executive power, it is disturbingly déjà vu to revisit the film. If we were to remake it today and title it “Judgment at Guantánamo” (or Abu Ghraib, or Washington, or [redacted] Secret CIA Prison), the script would have disquieting parallels—not in the degree of the crimes, but in the authoritarian, nationalistic mentality that leads one to justify uncivilized behaviors.

How far and deep, in the coming years, will these legal and constitutional factures run? Will we, in time, have our own “Ernst Jannings” confess:

My counsel would have you believe, we were not aware of torture. Of secret prisions. Of kidnappings, renditions, assassinations. Not aware?! Where were we?

Where were we when torture advocates began justifying it in the press—even in our very own Congress? Where were we when our newscasts and magazines published damning photographs? Where were we when torture logs were published? When witnesses testified before Congress or in publications? Where were we when advocates of justice and humanity cried out in warning? Were we deaf? Dumb? Blind?

My counsel says we were not aware of the extent of torture used. Not aware of deaths. Of secret prisions. Of kidnappings, renditions, assassinations. He would give you the excuse we were only aware of one or two unfortunate cases. Does that make us any the less guilty? Maybe we didn’t know the details. But if we didn’t know, it was because we didn’t want to know. Didn’t want to admit that many of our so-called enemy combatants were entirely innocent. Or even worse, discounted—justified—our own crimes because others’ crimes were so incomparably worse! Because our “good” intentions justified every means!

And will we, in time, have another Judge Haywood say:

The charge is that of conscious participation in a government-sanctioned system of cruelty and injustice in violation of every moral and legal principle known to all civilized nations. The tribunal has carefully studied the record and found therein abundant evidence to support beyond a reasonable doubt the charges against these defendants.

Defense Counsel, in their very skillful defense, have asserted that there are others who must share the ultimate responsibility for what happened. There is truth in this. The real complaining party at the bar in this courtroom is civilization. But this tribunal finds that the accused in the dock are responsible for their actions. Men and women who took part in the enactment of laws and decrees the purpose of which was the torture of human beings. Men and women who, in executive positions, actively participated in the enforcement of these “laws,” illegal under both U.S. and international law. The principle of criminal law in every civilized society has this in common: Any person who sways another to commit torture or murder—any person who furnishes the order for the purpose of the crime—any person who is an accessory to the crime is guilty.

Defense counsel further asserts that the defendants were exceptional lawyers and officials and acted in what they thought was the best interest of their country. There is truth in this also. But this trial has shown that under a national crisis ordinary, even able and extraordinary men and women, can delude themselves into the commission of crimes so heinous that they beggar the imagination. No one who has sat through this trial can ever forget them. How easily it can happen.

There are those in our own country too, who today speak of the protection of country—of survival. A decision must be made in the life of every nation at the very moment when the grasp of the enemy is at its throat. Then it seems that the only way to survive is to use the means of the enemy—to rest survival upon what is expedient—to look the other way. The answer to that is: Survival as what? A country isn’t a rock. It’s not an extension of one’s self. It’s what it stands for. It’s what it stands for when standing for something is the most difficult. Before the people of the world, let it now be noted that here, in our decision, this is what we stand for: Justice, truth, and the value of a single human being.

And will we, as a people, eventually come to say:

Judge Haywood, we wanted to tell you, we never knew it would come to what it did. You must believe it.

Only to hear our Judge reply:

It came to that the first time you justified the torture of another human being.

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1. Including former VP, Dick Cheney and former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff, Karl Rove. See also, References section at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Yoo for various writings and opinions.

What …? If …? How …?

(“Private” reflections for Miltonites*)

What does one do when captured by a phrase? The phrase, “Our minds tell us, and history confirms …” comes from page 2 of Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom. He uses it to protest excessive government, and he is probably (mostly) right, BUT somehow, he seems entirely unconscious of the “private” side of what “Our minds tell us, and history confirms ….” With each of his critiques of the public sector, a private sector parallel rears its substantial, unacknowledged head. Consider:

If we must keep government “from becoming a [public] Frankenstein that will destroy the very freedom we establish it to protect,”¹ what of private Frankensteins? What of private sector employment contracts that limit speech, that require work on Holy Days, that deny freedom of association, that create master/servant relationships, that subsume “common traditions” and loyalties to employer demands, that command and control and centralize in pursuit of efficiency and profit; etc., etc.?

If “[o]ur minds tell us, and history confirms, that the great threat to freedom is the concentration of power,”¹ why should we blindly, passively trust the self-regulating free-market that inexorably concentrates both wealth and power?

If two broad Constitutional principles have preserved our freedom despite repeated “violations in practice,”² might not the same principles to preserve freedom apply to the private sector and its violations: namely, limiting the size of market players and dispersing their power (but not their responsibility)?

How can we “insure that the private sector is a check on the powers of the governmental sector”³ when private sector money pursues and buys power and influence for self-interested agendas and curtails with impunity many of the fundamental freedoms as noted above?

If “[t]he preservation of freedom is the protective reason for limiting and decentralizing governmental power,”³ what about protecting freedom by limiting and decentralizing private economic power?

If “[t]he great advances of civilization … have never come from centralized government … or … in response to governmental directives”⁴ are those advances attributable to competitive capitalism or in spite of competitive capitalism? Were any of Friedman’s named achievers⁴ motivated by competition, efficiency, and profit, or were they impassioned by gifts, inspirations, and altruism?

If “[g]overnment can never duplicate the variety and diversity of individual action,”⁴ can competitive, corporate capitalism do so? Are not uniformity, standardization, conformity, stagnation, and mediocrity⁴also characteristic of most oversized “competitive” corporations? Where does most innovation come from—born from the head of a Zeus-corp or born in some obscure garage by real individuals?

If “freedom [is] the ultimate goal and the individual [is] the ultimate entity in society,”⁵ why is competitive capitalism chiefly built on the collective model with command and control centralized in top-down dictatorships of master/servant relationships? And does the legal-fiction that calls a corporate collective, an “individual with individual rights” really convince us that competitive capitalism based on such a fiction is the defending champion of freedom and individualism?

If “[a]ny system [i.e., Federal Reserve System] which gives so much power and so much discretion to a few men that mistakes—excusable or not—can have such far-reaching effects is a bad system … because it gives a few men such power without any effective check by the body politic,” what about the private and financial sector’s deregulation passion begun in the 1980s that “disperse[d] responsibility yet [gave] a few men great power,” without effective check?⁶

If the U.S. government’s “abrogation of the gold clauses [in the 1930s] was a measure destructive of the basic principles of free enterprise” by declaring contracts “invalid for the benefit of one of the parties!” what of private sector corporate restructuring which does the same?⁷

How are we going to get beyond entrenched fallacious theories, one-eyed analyses, justifications, and myths and manias of the “free-market” until we honestly consider what “our minds tell us, and history confirms …” about BOTH the public and private (corporate dominated) sectors? If collectivism is really masquerading in capitalistic, individualist clothing, do we have a free-market or just the pretence of one?

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*All page references below refer to Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom (Fortieth Anniversary Edition) The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, © 1962, 1982, 2002
1. p. 2
2. pp. 2-3
3. p. 3
4. pp. 3-4
5. p. 5
6. p. 50
7. p. 60